Between this and the Fables, besides some lesser things,[[506]] there appeared two of the longest and most ambitious in appearance of Dryden’s critical writings, the Essay [strictly Discourse] on Satire prefixed to the Juvenal, and the Dedication of the Æneis, with, between them, the first writing at any length by a very distinguished Englishman of letters, on the subject of pictorial art, in the shape of the Parallel of Poetry and Painting prefixed to the translation of Du Fresnoy De Arte Graphica. The Essay on Satire and the Dedication of the Æneis. All, being Dryden’s, are, and could not but be, admirably written and full of interest. But the Juvenal and Virgil Prefaces are, in respect of permanent value, both intrinsically and representively injured by an excess of critical erudition. The time was perhaps not yet ripe for an honest and candid address straight to the English reader. The translator was bound to recommend himself to classical scholars by attention to the paraphernalia of what then regarded itself as scholarship (“other brides, other paraphernalia” no doubt), and to propitiate wits, and Templars, and the gentlemen of the Universities, with original or borrowed discourses on literary history and principle. Dryden fell in with the practice, and obliged his readers with large decoctions of Rigaltius and Casaubon, Dacier and Segrais, which are at any rate more palatable than the learned originals, but which make us feel, rather ruefully, that boiling down such things was not the work for which the author of Absalom and Achitophel and of The Essay on Dramatic Poesy was born.
As for the Parallel, it is of course interesting as being nearly our first Essay, and that by a master hand, in a kind of criticism which has later given excellent results. The Parallel of Poetry and Painting. But Dryden, as he most frankly admits, did not know very much about the matter, and his work resolves itself very mainly into a discussion of the principles of Imitation in general, applied in an idealist manner to the two arts in particular. Again we may say, “Not here, O Apollo!”
We have nothing left but the Preface to the Fables, the extraordinary merit of which has been missed by no competent critic from Johnson to Mr Ker. The Preface to the Fables. The wonderful ease and urbanity of it, the artfully varied forms of reply to the onslaughts of Collier and others, are not more generally agreeable than are, in a special division, the enthusiastic eulogy of Chaucer (all the more entertaining because of its lack of mere pedantic accuracy in places), and the interesting, if again not always rigidly accurate, scraps of literary history. It winds up, as the Essay had practically begun, a volume of critical writing which, if not for pure, yet for applied, mixed, and sweetened criticism, deserves to be put on the shelf—no capacious one—reserved for the best criticism of the world.
We have seen, over and over again, in individual example; have already partially summed more than once; and shall have to re-sum with more extensive view later, the character and the faults of the critical method which had been forming itself for some hundred and fifty years when Dryden began his critical work. Dryden’s general critical position. It would be absurd to pretend that he was entirely superior to this “Spirit of the Age”—which was also that of the age behind him, and (with rare exceptions) of the age to come for nearly a hundred years. But, although it may be paradoxical, it is not absurd at all, to express satisfaction that he was not so entirely superior. He was enabled by his partial—and, in so far as his consciousness went, quite sincere—orthodoxy, to obtain an access to the general hearing in England, and even to influence, long after his death, important literary authorities, as he never could have done if he had set up for an iconoclast. Furthermore, it was not yet time to break these idols. Apollo winked at the neo-classical ignorance and heresy because it was useful. We are so apt—so generously and excusably apt—to look at the Miltons without considering the Clevelands, that we forget how absolutely ungoverned, and in some cases how near to puerility, the latest Elizabethan school was. We forget the slough of shambling verse in which true poets, men like Suckling in drama, men like Lovelace in lyric, complacently wallowed. The strait waistcoat was almost necessary, even after the fine madness, much more after the madness not so fine, of mid-seventeenth-century verse, and, in a less degree, prose. And so, when we find Dryden belittling the rhymes of Comus and Lycidas,[[507]] shaking his head over Shakespeare’s carelessness, unable with Chapman, as Ben had been with Marlowe, to see the fire for the smoke, we need not in the least excite ourselves, any more than when we find him dallying with the Dowsabels of Renaissance school-criticism. In the first place, the thing had to be done; and in the second place, his manner of doing it went very far to supply antidote to all the bane, as well as to administer the “corsives,” as they said then, in the mildest and most innocuous way possible.
His special critical method.
Dryden’s moly, an herb so powerful that—herein excelling its original—it not only prevented men like Addison from becoming beasts like Rymer, but had the virtue of turning beasts into men,—of replacing the neo-classic jargon by the pure language of criticism,—was that plan of actual comparison and examination of actual literature which is not merely the via prima but the via sola of safety for the critic. By his time there was assembled a really magnificent body of modern letters, in addition to classical and mediæval. But nobody in the late seventeenth century, except Dryden, really utilised it. Italy and Spain were sinking into premature senility. The French[[508]] despised or ignored all modern literatures but their own, and despised and ignored almost equally their own rich and splendid mediæval stores.
Dryden’s freedom from this worst and most hopeless vice is all the more interesting because, from some of his utterances, we might have expected him not to be free from it.[[509]] That theory of his as to Mr Waller; that disastrous idea that Shakespeare and Fletcher were low people who had not the felicity to associate with gentlemen,—might seem likely to produce the most fatal results. But not so. He accepts Chaucer at once, rejoices in him, extols him, just as if Chaucer had taken lessons from Mr Waller, and had been familiar with my Lord Dorset. Back his own side as he may in the duel of the theatres, he speaks of the great lights of the last age in such a fashion that no one has outgone him since. He cannot really take an author in hand, be he Greek or Latin, Italian or French or English, without his superiority to rules and systems and classifications appearing at once, however he may, to please fashion and fools, drag these in as an afterthought, or rather (for Dryden never “drags” in anything save the indecency in his comedies) draw them into the conversation with his usual adroitness. And he is constantly taking authors in hand in this way,—we are as certain that this, and not twaddling about unities and machines, was what he liked doing, as we are that he wrote comedies for money, and satires and criticism itself for love. Now this,—the critical reading without theory, or with theory postponed, of masses of different literatures, and the formation and expression of genuine judgment as to what the critic liked and disliked in them, not what he thought he ought to like and dislike,—this was what was wanted, and what nobody had yet done. Dryden did it—did it with such mastery of expression as would almost have commended a Rymer, but with such genuine critical power and sympathy as would almost have carried off the absence of merits of expression altogether. He established (let us hope for all time) the English fashion of criticising, as Shakespeare did the English fashion of dramatising,—the fashion of aiming at delight, at truth, at justice, at nature, at poetry, and letting the rules take care of themselves.
Perhaps in no single instance of critical authorship and authority does the great method of comparison assist us so well as in the case of Dryden and Boileau. Dryden and Boileau. This comparison is absolutely fair. The two were almost exact contemporaries; they represented—so far at least as their expressed and, in both cases, no doubt conscientious, literary creed went—the same sect. Enfin Malherbe vint is an exact parallel, whether as a wonderful discovery or a partly mischievous delusion, to the exploits on our numbers by Mr Waller. Both were extremely powerful satirists. Both, though not comparable in intrinsic merit, were among the chief men of letters of their respective countries. Both had a real, and not merely a professional or affected, devotion to literature. Both applied, with whatever difference of exclusiveness and animus, a peculiar literary discipline, new to the country of each. And in the case of both—it has been decided by a consensus of the best judges, with all the facts before them up to the present time—there was an insufficient looking before and after, a pretension to limit literature to certain special developments.
We have seen what, in carrying out the scheme which was in effect the scheme of both, were the defects of Boileau. Let us see what, in contra-position to them, are the merits of Dryden.
That, though he makes mistakes enough in literary history, these mistakes are slight in comparison with Boileau’s, matters not very much; that, though his satiric touch was more withering even than the Frenchman’s, he has no love of lashing merely for the sport, and never indulges in insolent flings at harmless dulness, suffering poverty, or irregular genius; that, though quite prone enough to flatter, he declined to bow the knee to William of Orange, while Boileau persistently grovelled at the feet of William’s enemy,—these things matter even less to us. The fact, the critical fact, remains that the faults of his time and his theory did the least harm to Dryden of all men whom we know, while they did the most to Boileau. And the reason of the fact is more valuable than the fact itself. Boileau, as we have seen, has not left us a single impartial and appreciative criticism of a single author, ancient or modern. Dryden simply cannot find himself in presence of a man of real genius, whether he belongs to his own school or another, without having his critical lips at once touched by Apollo and Pallas. He was sadly ignorant about Chaucer,—a board-school child might take him to task; but he has written about Chaucer with far more real light and sympathy than some at least of the authors of the books from which the board-school child derives its knowledge have shown. His theory about Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Jonson was defective; but he has left us criticisms of all three than which we have, and are likely to have, no better. About the ancients he borrows from both ancients and moderns; but it is remarkable that while Boileau’s borrowings are his best, Dryden’s are infinitely his worst part. So the consequence is that while Boileau is merely a point de repère, a historical document which men simply strive to bring to some relation with the present and the future, Dryden is and will remain at once a source and a model for ever. And he is these because he had the wisdom to ask himself the question, “Do I think this good or bad?” and the wit to answer it, instead of asking and answering the other, “Is it good or bad according to this or that scheme and schedule?”